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Author Topic: Does anyone know of a free utility for wiping drives?
Dagonee
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We're donating an old computer, and want to make sure information isn't recoverable like it is w/ fdisk.

It's Win 98, if that matters.
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Kwea
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Try Windex, my screen is ALWAYS clean using it... [Big Grin]
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Sid Meier
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partition magic/manager?
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Dagonee
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Ooh, I found this. It makes a boot disk with a Linux kernel. Boot the disk, and you can wipe all drives.

Seems to work great.

Kwea: [Big Grin]

Sid, partition managers by default don't prevent the data from being readable. There are recovery tools that can get at some of the data.

Some partition managers have that feature, but I don't have any of them.
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TomDavidson
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If time is not an issue, Dag, you can use this:
http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file_description/0%2Cfid%2C22920%2C00.asp

It'll write zeroes to every sector on your drive once. (The pay version writes three times, and is thus DoD-compliant.) But it's slow.

I hear this one's a bit faster:
http://dban.sourceforge.net/
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Dagonee
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Dban's the one I found. It ain't a speed demon either (it's 1/3 of the way through the second pass), but it's doing it without me

Once would have been enough - I'm not expecting someone to try to read the magnetic encoding directly. I've just read enough articles about people buying uses computers which have only been fdisked that I wanted an actual erasure.

Thanks. I'll make a note of both of them for the future.
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